Inbound Marketing Strategy: 3 Hidden Insights Explained by ZERIN TASNIM on OCTOBER 15, 2015
Rating: Today I’m opening up how you could use the most effective inbound marketing strategy on your blog to generate leads in your favor. You may have chosen the right colors, the correct shape of the CTA buttons, optimized your sidebar banner and even gotten a fabulous headline – yet you could be suffering from the scarcity of leads. Investment in blogs for businesses have increased greatly as a part of investment in marketing, and what is significant is the fact that marketers who blog have experienced a 67% increase in leads as opposed to those who don’t. Not just that but blogging has resulted in 55% more leads for internet marketers.
Here’s why.
How does a Blog Work? At this point you could be slightly confused as to how a blog could ever be effective in capturing leads. When it comes to capturing leads, the first thing you’re told is you have to be quick and precise to get the message through, right? You’re told that you have only 8 seconds to get a visitor to your landing page interested, otherwise the person’s bound to leave. Tick tock. Tick tock. While that is undoubtedly true, a blog works wonders of its own. The word blog is basically a mash up of the two words web log and it serves as a journal mostly. However, the use of a blog has evolved over the years and now for most internet marketers it serves as a platform where they can advice their potential or existing customers and even have discussions with them. Joy the Baker for instance is a baking blog where Joy Wilson broadcasts her baking skillsthrough text and images and at the same time participate in conversation with her visitors.
In doing so, not only Joy Wilson, but what other internet marketers can achieve are as follows: 1. Broadcast yourself. When you’re blogging you’re talking about the various services that you offer. This is the one place where you can talk about yourself as much as you want without coming across as a haughty personality. 2. Give advice. People won’t always arrive at your landing page wondering what you’re services are. Maybe they already know. However, what they may be seeking is expert advice on how to proceed with the next step whether it be closing a financial deal with you, or simply how they can implement your services. For example, most companies providing B2B services to internet marketers have a blog where they write on a regular basis providing detailed information about how one can avail their services. Blogging is like consultation, except a lot more exciting perhaps – or maybe it’s just me because I love writing!
Anyway, that’s enough about me. 3. Generate leads. That’s right. Your blog will help you generate the leads that you so desperately want. There are 2 factors that you need to be addressing in order to generate leads from your blog. One is where your visitors are coming from, and two, at which stage of the sales funnel they are situated in. And this is what the next section is about.
Where are your Visitors Coming from There are a few ways in which people could have arrived at your blog:
They could have searched for something on Google for which you could have been a result
They’ve keyed your address in after they saw/heard from someone
Seen your page on an ad
Where your visitors are coming from is important to determine simply which of the channels you are investing in are giving you a profitable return. You need to look after and maintain each of these channels so that you realize which ones need pruning and which are doing just fine. However, what’s more important is not how they wound up at your page, rather what they came seeking because that is how you have to gear your content.
The Sales Funnel The sales funnel allows you to pinpoint the position of your visitors on the ladder of sales. Here’s an image that will help you understand better.
So I hope you understand now that the preferences or needs of each visitor will vary depending on which stage they stand and this is why you’re going to have to make sure that you have a little bit of something for everyone in your blog posts.
And this is why the next part deals with how you make an effective blog that generates leads.
A Blog that Converts If you’ve come this far you’re now absolutely ready to take on the most essential inbound marketing strategy of a blog that’s sure to earn you your leads. Let’s get down to business.
1. Quality not Quantity Matters Simply putting together a how-to article will not help you in any way. It’ll simply be a waste of time and resources. You have to do more than just jot down the 7 things that you believe a person needs to have on their landing page. Your blogs have to be detailed.
There’s no reason to be scared. It’s actually quite an easy task.
Suppose you’re going to be talking about analytics that can make landing pages convert and you decide to discuss 5 such pointers. Now instead of just listing them, address each of the issues one at a time and enrich it with examples and references that you’d come across during your research. That way you can build on your quality. There are two direct benefits of breaking things down and explaining them separately. One, for those who’ve arrived at your blog and don’t know a thing about, say internet marketing, will be still able to comprehend what you’re talking about. And two, is that you’ll be able to rank high on Google without compromising on quality. While making your article detailed for your customers is great idea, you have to remember to make something for the finalists who are scrutinizing your offers along with that of your competitors. What do you do now? Well you could either partake in price competition or non-price competition. How you’re going to be handling your prices is for you to decide, however, I’ll tell you how you could get an edge over your competitors by upgrading the quality of your content. Instead of just elaborating points, you could also use case studies in order to make your post more specific and profound.
2. Arm your Blog Posts with CTAs This is one of the most important aspects of your page, whether it be your blog post or your landing page.
CTAs or call-to-actions buttons are your lifelines in internet marketing because this is the only way you can sustain your business. This is why there are several blogs that help explain how you can make CTAs that can emotionally appeal to your visitors along with the technicalities of CTA optimization.
If you or your CTAs sound vague or unsure, there’s no chance your visitors are taking a single step ahead. To have CTAs dispersed throughout the post is a great idea. Also CTAs don’t always have to be buttons, but if they are make sure the message goes out loud and clear. Add subscription or opt in forms onto your sidebars like in this picture below.
Here is another example,
Here a secret strategy Brian adds that only subscribers get more exclusive tips that not published on the blog.
And ask your readers to share, comment or mail you at the end of your blog (an example below) .
3. Full Speed Ahead! Finally what you’ve got to do is maintain your steady progress with the quality and type of blogs you were writing. The reason is this: you can’t expect results in just a few days or even weeks. It’ll take at least a few months for your cogs to be oiled and smoothly running. Like Neil Patel says, “Just don’t focus on monetizing your blog until you have at least 20,000 monthly readers.” And chances of getting 20,000 readers overnight could be nothing short of a miracle. There’s nothing wrong in hoping for one though.
Conclusion
Well, I think that was a pretty intense session on how you can generate ‘custom made’ leads for visitors to your blogs for each stage of the sales funnel. Unlike other pages of your website you can’t exactly expect results instantly. But that’s perhaps the only down side, because once you think you have the perfect blog (you want to get it A/B tested in order to be safe) you’re all set to type away. So let me know how you’re doing with these steps and if you’ve got any problems, or just want to say ‘hi’ leave me a massage below and we’ll strike it up some time soon. Till then happy blogging!